In Season Two, Undone Expands Its Scope and Loses Its Air of Ambiguity

The first season of Undone wrapped up with Alma Winograd-Diaz (Rosa Salazar) sitting in front of a cave in Mexico. Her dead father, Jacob (Bob Odenkirk), didn’t emerge alive from it the way that he said he would, if Alma took full advantage of her powers. She can experience time in a fluid, nonlinear fashion and seemingly change the past, but later episodes suggested that her abilities might be schizophrenic delusions. Neither possibility was confirmed by season’s end, leaving the reality of Alma’s mental state open to interpretation.

For both better and worse, season two of Undone more or less does away with this ambiguity. Whether Alma is sane or not is no longer the show’s plot hook; in the first episode, she enters the alternate timeline she created, a world where Jacob is still alive and her life has turned out differently. The series proceeds as if these events are real, and Alma merges with her alternate self, a college professor who never alienated her loved ones the way she had in that past life.

The initial episodes that explore this second reality exemplify Undone at its most philosophically fraught and fascinating, dealing with the idea that Alma’s “better” life hasn’t brought her satisfaction. Her sister, Becca (Angelique Cabral), still experiences family issues, and while Jacob is no longer dead, he retains knowledge of his death in the other timeline and lives his life passively, for fear that he could wipe himself out of existence all over again.

Unfortunately, these dilemmas quickly fade into the background as the series adopts a more straightforward format in its second season. Undone’s first season allowed Alma and Jacob to make a series of mistakes, while apparent solutions only presented new issues and uncomfortable truths. By contrast, season two provides tidy explanations for the behavior of characters like Alma’s mother, Camila (Constance Marie), and Jacob’s mother, Geraldine (Holley Fain). In expanding its scope by depicting the past lives of even more characters, the series fails to give others the same depth and specificity that it gave to Alma, boiling down their outlooks on life to tiny, malleable moments that require choosing the “right” path.

Undone eventually arrives at the rather predictable conclusion that the characters should accept certain outcomes, and that not everything can or should be changed. But by the time it gets there, we’ve already watched Alma and the others repeatedly alter their lives for the better. The message comes across like an asterisk hastily tacked on to a season that predominantly depicts life as having a series of “right” answers. As Undone pivots to other characters’ secret lovers and anxieties on the way to a more treacly and definitive conclusion, it flattens characters like Jacob by downplaying his more complicated, unsavory qualities.

While the show’s rotoscope style remains distinctive and transportive, capturing the minute details on the actors’ faces, the depictions of the characters’ mental landscapes are less inventive. A rather typical collection of foggy voids and locked doors, they leave far less of an impression than the prior season’s free-flowing depiction of time, with characters who might hang out in the hand-drawn meadow of a “get well soon” card. Now, time is broken into a linear “before” and “after” accessed through memory portals, with transitions (like a plant that rapidly grows to cover the screen) that retain only a fraction of the visual interest.

Though Undone’s story no longer hinges on whether or not its protagonist is sane, the series has lost the air of uncertainty in favor of depicting lives whose problems are implausibly neat and solvable. It’s a journey for definite solutions that feels less like the messy, disorienting process of being alive than playing a video game while reading the strategy guide.